During the 1960s, with the full flowering of the Civil Rights Movement, such films began to take on a harsher, more politically demanding edge. At first from abroad, later from sources outside the major studios, they challenged the simplistic optimism of Poitier's heyday. Costa-Gavras's The Battle of Algiers (1966) seemed to some black militants a textbook for direct action, while Amiri Baraka spoke of the movie version of his short play Dutchman (1967) as a "revolutionary revelation." Even the Hollywood movies hardened: Robert Mulligan's film version of Harper Lee's novel To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) ended with the death of its black protagonist, and Sidney Lumet's The Pawnbroker (1965) is set in a harsh Harlem dominated by a coldly ominous drug dealer (played by Brock Peters). By way of contrast, more pastoral films such as Martin Ritt's Sounder (1972) and Gordon Park's autobiographical The Learning Tree (1969) seemed childlike in their remoteness from the coming wave of angry films.

Catalysts for this turn toward rage, the cities of the late 1960s burst into riots of despair at the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and the seeming exhaustion of his movement. Awaiting the arrival of this new wave of films were hundreds of derelict, cavernous downtown theaters, along with thousands of black youths upon whom the Civil Rights Movement had had scant impact. The prototype of the new genre, soon dubbed "blaxploitation" films by the trade paper Variety, was Melvin Van Peeble's Sweet Sweetback's Baad Asssss Song (1971). More than any other movie, Sweetback defined its era. Jangling in its lighting and music track, and heady with contempt for the white social order and its cops, the film's success all but invited Hollywood's major studios to rush forward in pursuit of the new audience. MGM's Shaft (1971), for example, played to the crowd by featuring a mouthy, streetwise hero who, in reality, was not an outlaw in Sweetback's mold but merely a plainclothes cop. From the outset, the Hollywood studio version of this black, urban, outlaw culture cynically followed a familiar pattern. Cool Breeze(1972) was remade from The Asphalt Jungle, The Lost Man (1969) from Canon Reed's Odd Man Out, and Up Tight (1968) from John Ford's film of an Irish rebellion, The Informer. The Hollywood studios even plundered genres like horror movies in films such as Blacula (1972) and Blackenstein (1972).